‘My Marketing Internship At Birla Sun Life Insurance’, Akash Ranjan

“I am a hardworking and passionate person, who does everything with dedication. In my free time, I read business and technology magazines. My hobby is blogging. In my 1st year of MBA, I earned 3 certificates courses and did 4 live projects. I am an active member of marketing club and also presently the Senior Head of two clubs of my college.

Read about Akash Ranjan Patra, a 2nd year MBA at Fortune Institute of International Business, who completed his marketing internship with Birla Sun Life Insurance.

After having done so much, Internship was a much-needed requirement for me

Akash feels a marketing internship was vital for him to get a reality check and experience something new, in order to expose himself to the real business market. He says, “as I am passionate about marketing, I always wanted a marketing internship to learn and practically implement marketing concepts I have learnt in the college classroom.”

“After studying diverse business concepts in my MBA program ranging from Marketing to Finance to HR and to Operations for complete 1 year, I finally decided to search for a marketing internship. I wanted to practically implement the things that I had learnt in the classroom. The marketing internship helped me understand how businesses actually operate in a competitive environment.”

“I interned with Birla Sun Life Insurance as a Marketing intern for 3 months. It’s an awesome company to work for and the work culture is really amazing. The kind of work and training the company provided was good. Every day at work was exciting; to explore new insights to the business.”

“My first day started with the briefing session i.e. the work I have to do and generate results for the company. From 2nd day onwards, I started understanding the entire market of India and used various filters like geographic, demographics, psychographics etc and figured out the target group/market for the company whom it will target them through appropriate advertisements to convert them into customers. Then, I started working on understanding the consumer behaviour of the target market, which is the toughest job for every marketer. So, I prepared a detailed questionnaire for a survey, to understand the unfulfilled needs and problems of the customers and how the company can cater to that. I did an online as well as an offline survey by reaching out to customers in the target market.”

“After 2 weeks, I finally got lots of responses from different customers. I tried to understand their needs and problems and soon started working on analyzing advertising channels. I contacted some popular T.V channels, Radio channels, Newspaper and Magazine advertisers, Billboard advertising agencies to know the advertising costs, the reach of the advertisements and revenue to be generated. I also analyzed online and social media advertising data. Based on Return on Investment (ROI) and survey on Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC) channels, I selected appropriate advertising channels for Birla Sun Life Insurance.”

Then, I worked on the most exciting part of the internship. It was making advertising campaigns for the company. I made some creative advertising posters, suggested a tagline to my team members after all brainstorming and also shoot real TVC advertisements for an advertisement campaign and they are still close to my heart. Finally, I merged all the small tasks I performed and made a marketing communication strategy for Birla Sun Life Insurance, New Delhi. I along with my teammates gave a presentation to our corporate mentor about the marketing communication strategy we have made and what will be its impact on company’s bottom line.”

“My corporate mentor was really impressed with the work I did for entire 3 months along with my teammates. Finally, when I was awarded the certificate of completion of the internship, I felt all my hard work and dedication paid off!”

Q. Would you recommend Letsintern to others? If yes, Why?

“Yes, definitely. I will strongly recommend my friends, my juniors in my college, and also students of various career streams to stay updated about upcoming careers and internships from many good companies. Letsintern is a very good online internship platform for students to easily search for internships and experiment as much as possible. Letsintern is also doing a great job by making students alert and aware about careers and internships through its quality blog entries.”

Q. In the end, do you have any tips that can help other students in getting a good internship?

“Students should not completely depend on placement cell of their college for internships, where there is a limited choice in choosing the company they want to work for. Using internship platform like Letsintern can open up vast opportunities for students to choose an internship in various good companies pan India along with getting a stipend for their work during the internship.”